Best answer

I’ve had the best experience in SurveyGizmo when avoiding duplicate questions if at all possible. An important result of this is that all of your data is recorded in the same field, and can be used to generate aggregate reports. With two separate questions for “him” and “her”, you’ll have data in two different fields, and will not be able to generate a report on that data as a whole.

One possible solution for avoiding duplicate questions in your situation, would be to use a merge code to pipe in the pronoun. An example question title:

What type of car would [question(“title”), id=”x”] drive?

This would allow you to use one field for both the male and female version of each question. A merge code has to pull from somewhere of course, so a “gender” question would be added to your survey on a previous page.

In your situation, you want the gender to be picked at random, which could be done with a Hidden Value action set to generate a random number. This would be on another page, before the gender question, with the merge code for the hidden value action being placed as the default answer for the gender question. A picture may help to clarify this:

With this workflow, you first randomly pick a number with the Hidden Value action on page 1, which matches the reporting values in your gender question on page 2. The gender question uses this random number as it’s default answer (by way of merge code).

Both of these pages are autosubmitted, so the first thing your respondent sees is page 3 – and by this time, the gender question on page 2 has been populated with either “he” (1) or “she” (2). The way that default answers work requires the reporting values for the gender question to match the random numbers generated on page one. Because of this, when later referring to the gender question, you’ll want to use the “option title” merge code, rather than the “reporting value” merge code. Basically, use question(“title”) instead of question(“value”).

I think you can look forward to a full tutorial for this showing up in our documentation sometime soon, but please let me know if any of this is unclear and I’d be happy to help clarify And I hope this information helps! Here are a few more resources in case any of the features mentioned are unfamiliar to you: